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Friday, November 02, 2012

Mission Control

Get your tech geek on with Apollo Flight Controller 101, a fully illustrated tour of the Gemini/Apollo era mission control facility. It goes through each station and describes what the person manning it was responsible for on the mission, as well as providing detailed (and original) schematics of each console. There's even a graphical explanation of how the super hugemongous display screen worked: it was a complex Rube Goldberg device of vacuum tubes, projectors and physical slides. Wonderfully primitive stuff.

posted by Jar(egg)head at 08:41

1 Comments:

Blogger curmudgeon said...

When I was a kid, I wanted a career in elecronics. I spent a lot of time in classes for such. My instructors at the Area Technical Trade Center in Las Vegas, especially lead instructor Mr. Schatz, insisted we learn stuff like slide rules and vacuum tubes. In other words, we also studied analog stuff.
There are things that can be done with vacuum tubes that no transistor-based electronics can replicate. Sadly, we pretty much have no more vacuum tubes, with the exception of a few CRTs.

11:12  

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